Such inconvenient truth is solidly backed up by official sources too, as confirmed by the last published statistics from the ONS.

Following an increase between 1998 and 2000, there has been a decline since 2002 in the proportion of men drinking more than 21 units a week, on average, and in the proportion of women drinking more than 14 units.

Yet still we see emotive pictures from the more, ahem, excitable of our mainstream press.

So, although consumption is most definitely decreasing, the behaviour of those out on the razzle must be appalling. After all, there wouldn't be the great call for minimum alcohol pricing to stop all those youths 'pre-loading' otherwise, right?

To find out, it's best to ask the experts. And this is where the Freedom of Information Act can be so very useful. For example, if you asked a large police force - the Metropolitan Police is a good one - how many people have been arrested for 'drunk and disorderly' since 2001, what do you think the response would be?

Well, as it happens, someone has done exactly that. As expected, it looks bad ...

... for those who believe our government, their state-funded quangoes, and the quite absurdly gullible mainstream media, that is (yes, even Ed West).

It must be noted (since lies don't appear here) that the last figure only encompasses 11 months, but extrapolation would still suggest that 2010 is on course for producing the lowest London D&D arrest rate of the decade.

I'm guessing that the trend is probably a nationwide thing. Why not try asking your nearest police force the same question?

11 comments:

Ah, a bit of a cautionary caveat; I used to do crime stats for the Rozzers and it's relatively utter bollox. Attempted burglary = criminal damage, drunk & disorderly = section 105 public order offence, robbery = abh etc. They're not really worth the paper they're written on but...

You do have to take those arrest stats with a pinch of salt, as arrests for drunk & disorderly will by definition to a large extent reflect the amount of police effort put into combating it. Compare this with burglary where it is possible to obtain a figure for the number of offences committed independent of the number of arrests.

It is well-attested that the police seem increasingly reluctant to involve themselves in situations with members of the public who may be troublesome, preferring easy targets.

There really is no need for such hyperbolic alarmism in driving down rates, though. In fact, the more shrill the chorus, the more arrests seem to have stopped declining and levelled off, it seems to me.